Book Club Check-in: We Need to Talk About Claudia from Subduction

This is KUOW’s book club, and we just finished reading the first half of Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction. I’m your club leader, Katie Campbell. Let’s get started.

I am just a reader standing in front of Claudia and asking her Chill out.

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To recap: Claudia, one of our main characters, is a Latino anthropologist who has traveled to the Makah Nation in Neah Bay to continue her work with an elderly Makah woman named Maggie. Maggie is suffering from dementia when her son, Peter, our other main character, resurfaces. Peter is haunted by the murder of his father. Claudia is haunted by her husband’s affair with her own sister. Neither of them deals with their pain in a particularly healthy way, but Claudia deals with it by taking what is not hers: Maggie’s stories, memories, and songs.

I’ll start with a quote:

Later, on page 81, Peter describes Claudia’s approach as “a buzzard’s circle,” a beautiful metaphor that perfectly describes what she’s up to – and shows us, the readers, that Peter sees right through her. What Claudia may not yet realize is that Maggie seems to know, at least in part, what she’s doing, too.

Consider how Maggie changes some small but important details when she tells them both an old Makah story about Thunderbird. She says Blue Jay sends the trickster Kwa-Ti to bring him the Blackberry Bird’s daughter. Peter informs the reader that in the story from his childhood, it is actually Salmonberry Bird’s daughter, and he is pretty sure his mother knows this as well as he does. It’s hard to imagine Maggie being confused. Perhaps she is deliberately staying away from Claudia, who casually compares her to Kwa-Ti.

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Frankly, Peter isn’t much of a hero either – although I do feel more sympathy for him as he tries to find his way back to his own home while also dealing with some pretty brutal memories of his father’s death (am I the only one who finds the flashbacks a little confusing?). The way he sees sleeping with Claudia as almost inevitable – and I suppose he was right – reveals his less likable qualities and something darker beneath the surface.

However, this quote seems to express how much he is tormented:

And of course he is needed. Maggie needs him. Claudia needs him, if only to get what she wants from Maggie. And the memory of his father needs him.

Through Peter we get a complex picture of his father, who brought him great joy as a child and at the same time caused strife in the family. Perhaps he still does the latter.

Honestly, I can’t see anything good coming out of Claudia’s presence unless she gets her moral affairs in order. But I’m very interested to see how she can help Peter, Maggie, and the readers figure out what happened to Peter’s father. The bloody flashbacks to his father on the trailer floor, the dream-like scene on the boat, the reference to Dave feeling bad when he “disappeared” – I’m captivated by the mystery here and yearn for more clarity. I have a feeling Peter feels the same way.

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A small update to our reading and newsletter plan: You should still Finish the book by July 29 if you want to read my analysis that day without getting spoilers. But you won’t get my interview with Kristen Millares Young that same day – I know, I’m sorry! I will be interviewing Young (more on that later). It will just come out later this week.

All I can say for now is that we are working on some exciting new things with the book club.

Don’t forget to send me your thoughts as we continue reading “Subduction.” You can email me directly at [email protected]. Additionally, our newsletter subscribers can sign up for our September Vote in the next few weeks. Register here!

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